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Here's an interesting challenge: go 24 hours without complaining.
Today I am trying this! One entire day without complaining once. I don't think of myself as a complainer, but I'll bet I'll be surprised at how hard it will be.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This little post has somehow become the most popular thing I have ever written, as well as the first time I have gotten blowback on my blog. The blowback was about the racism that is happening in some Mennonite churches against those who don't share the heritage I describe. I wanted to add a note addressing this, because otherwise my post could be seen as encouraging this kind of discrimination. To be clear, I see being Mennonite as both an ethnic heritage and a Christian denomination. You can be a Mennonite because you joined a church and subscribe to Mennonite beliefs and/or you can be a Mennonite because you were born into a Mennonite family (in which case, you may not even have religious beliefs). This is possible because of the unique history of Mennonites: what began as a purely religious movement became a culture and ethnicity as the people who started the movement joined together from their different countries of origin and separated themselves from the …

Last weekend I went backpacking along the Sunshine Coast Trail, a beautiful hut-to-hut trail along the coast of BC. It was a short jaunt of three days and two nights (just a 25km section of the 180km trail), and it was also a pretty big deal.

In the past, I wouldn't have even considered doing something like this. I had zero gear, zero know-how, and thought all hiking was a painful uphill slog. I didn't think I could do it and therefore I had no interest in trying. Why would I want to do a torturous Stairmaster in the woods, after all?

Then I started dating an outdoorsy person and slowly realized that I am actually capable of doing some of this stuff. We went for hikes, and eventually, overnight trips into the wilderness. It turned out I actually enjoyed walking around in the woods! Even with 30 pounds of stuff strapped to my back!

I slowly acquired gear. I also slowly acquired confidence in my ability to slog through the woods, in large part due to my trusty guide. My outdoor…